'Black Mirror' impossibly predicted David Cameron's #PigGate scandal

If you're not up on your British tabloid gossip, The Daily Mailpublished an anonymous claim that British Prime Minister David Cameron engaged in some highly questionable acts with a dead pig during an initiation ceremony while studying at Oxford. (We'll let you click through to the particularly sick article to see what it was.)

What makes this bizarre claim, excerpted from a new unauthorized Cameron biography by former Conservative Party treasurer Michael Ashcroft and political journalist Isabel Oakeshott, even crazier: it closely, too closely, mirrors the plot of an episode of the sci-fi TV show Black Mirror.

On Black Mirror, each episode depicts different visions of the future—some similar to our current world, some wildly different—that show the warped, devastating effect our growing technology addiction has on humanity. And the episode in question, Black Mirror's most recent season premiere, posits an impossible situation: if a Prime Minister was asked to do an unspeakable act with a pig on live television in order to free a hostage, would he?

Watch a trailer for the episode:

An unnamed allegation in the Daily Mail is about as leaky a source you can get, and the British press is in for weeks of myth-debunking and drama. But we can't help but feel a little unnerved that the show's bleak, dystopian visions of our society are closer to the truth than we may think.

And in case you were wondering if the episode had any roots in that shadowy Oxford ritual, the show's creator Charlie Brooker is claiming it's all a coincidence:

Just to clear it up: nope, I’d never heard anything about Cameron and a pig when coming up with that story. So this weirds me out.